René Girard: 25 december 1923 – 4 november 2015

”Much of his thought is complex; I’ve found myself pausing to consider a single paragraph or passage for minutes at a time. Yet, perhaps his best-known insight — certainly the one that has meant the most to me — is quite simple and turns one of the most famous works of comparative religion ever published, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, upside down.

In his massive study, Frazer noticed a recurring pattern, common to myths and religions throughout the ancient world: the pattern of the scapegoat; that is, the sacrifice of a sacred leader or king. In the Oedipus myth, for example, order returns to Thebes only after Oedipus has gouged out his own eyes and is driven into exile. Seeing the same pattern in the gospels — Jesus is crucified on a cross bearing the placard ”king of the Jews” — Frazer concluded that Christianity represented merely one more ancient myth above which modern man could rise, abandoning ‘magic,’ as Frazer often called religion, for science.

René Girard’s contribution? To notice a feature that neither Frazer nor his followers had grasped: that, whereas the scapegoats sacrificed in the ancient myths were understood to be guilty — Oedipus really did murder his father and marry his mother — the scapegoat sacrificed in the Christian account is understood to be completely innocent. In condemning Jesus to death, Pontius Pilate, conscious of Christ’s innocence, publicly washes his hands, attempting to cleanse himself of what he has done; even the centurion in charge of the execution proclaims of Jesus, ‘Truly, this was the son of God.'”